Well, color me productive

There's this quilt I'm going to make. I have some general guidelines, but nothing very specific yet. I've had it in the back--and sometimes the front--of my mind recently, kind of hoping for inspiration but not getting all that far as yet.

Yesterday it was rainy and cold and the girls were with José and Yolanda for the weekend and I decided to try pulling out some fabric as an alternate first step. I had been assuming that, in order to do that, I would have to clean off my sewing table first, and maybe even find a permanent storage solution for the fabric, which has been in the top of the girls' closet ever since we moved here. Safe and sound, but not terribly accessible.

Obviously, that's too big a project to take seriously on any given day, so it has been postponed on a regular basis.

Anyway, yesterday I thought I'd get out some fabric and look at it and think about it, and THEN worry about where I would keep it. I got down every last piece from the closets, and even the smaller stash in a box on my table, and the bundles I was given at the last retreat. Everything.

I put in my Friends DVDs (for once putting them to the use for which they were intended) and began to sort and fold. Most of the fabric was at least somewhat folded, but a lot of it had been on piles that had fallen over or been riffled through in pursuit of whatever, so a lot of straightening and a bit of refolding was in order.

Boy, it takes a longer than you'd think to get a closet full of fabric into relatively neat stacks, but by the time I went to bed I had...

A medium-tall stack of odd-sized fabrics:

A collection of threads, knots and scraps too small to keep:

A big box 3/4 full of neatly folded quarter-yards
(and other sized fabrics that could pass for a quarter):

And four stacks of yard-ish (and up) pieces:

Oh, and also a bag of scraps and a collection of things that should never have been put away with the fabric:

This morning I went back and re-folded the many larger pieces that, while neat, had come out of the closet folded to the wrong width. I just put all the wide ones together last night, but ultimately they all have to be about the same size so they can be stored together.

Then I sorted by color which (lest anyone get the wrong idea) is not an anal thing to do. It's necessary because otherwise there would be no way to really know what's available when planning a quilt or a color scheme. It's not like arranging the books on your shelf by size or color. Really. Quilters, back me up here - I feel judged (hard to say by who, considering that nobody has even read this yet...).

Anyway, here are the folded, sorted fruits of that labor:

And let's have another close up of the re-sorted quarters because they're just so pretty:

And then I was able to pull out some preliminary fabrics. No real specific thoughts yet, but we know that sage green is going to play a part in it, so I started with that, added some lights, and threw in some accent colors (which would probably be used sparingly). No idea if this is the way it'll go, but it's nice to have created a starting point.